Book recommendations for designing databases?

Any good book recommendations for designing an SQL database for a website? I'm not a complete novice on the issue, of course. I have SQL experience and have done quite a bit of web development, but I am currently working on a web project and am having trouble designing a good scalable database for the site.

Any good book recommendations for designing an SQL database for a website?

I must point out that this is rather vague: a website might not even need a database, or it might need a database to compete with the likes of say, Facebook, Google, etc.

Originally Posted by DavidP

I'm not a complete novice on the issue, of course. I have SQL experience and have done quite a bit of web development, but I am currently working on a web project and am having trouble designing a good scalable database for the site.

I get maybe two dozen requests for help with some sort of programming or design problem every day. Most have more sense than to send me hundreds of lines of code. If they do, I ask them to find the smallest example that exhibits the problem and send me that. Mostly, they then find the error themselves. "Finding the smallest program that demonstrates the error" is a powerful debugging tool.

Over the years I've always fell back to Mastering SQL by Martin Gruber, Sybex. It's a 1,000 page book on everything SQL and database design. Other books try to do the same thing, but in my opinion none so comprehensively and with such a broad scope (note the title) as this book.

Other than the one above, two other books have been inspirational/instrumental in my understanding of the relational model and how to best apply it:

Trees and Hierarchies in SQL for Smartiesby Joe Celko, Elsevier. It gets you into highly productive designs to better represent data structures and relationships that are hard to represent in relational database.

I never bought any other SQL book than those three.

Originally Posted by brewbuck:Reimplementing a large system in another language to get a 25% performance boost is nonsense. It would be cheaper to just get a computer which is 25% faster.